Monday, December 14, 2015

Timequake: force INFINITY

Remember Tim Burton's production of Dr Who, with Johnny Depp in the role of Davros, which he modelled after Rottwang in Metropolis? And the personal-robot Sherman Cyberman from the same assembly line as the admirable Kryten from Red Dwarf? NO WAIT that never happened in this time-line, but we did get the next best thing, which is Millennium.

Millennium has the production standards of a Blake's 7 episode and the performance conventions that you see in early Cronenberg fillums, and take to be an expression of his Ballardian themes of dehumanisation and the deaths of affect and personal connection, until they show up in every other movie from that milieu. It has sexual politics from the 1970s, with characters all querulous about Women's Lib, and special effects from the 1960s. Mixed in with 1980s New Romantics hair styles, which evidently will be born again in the distant dying future, along with grimy black-leather uniforms made all the more dystopian and cyberpunk by glueing on IC chips.
It is as if the script fell through a time-slip, collapsing decades and accreting layers of temporal artefact.
I think I have a new favourite bad movie.

5 comments:

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Is it a better bad movie than "Hawk the Slayer"?

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Ah yes, the Millennium Failcon.
~

Smut Clyde said...

I have not exposed myself to "Hawk the Slayer" and I am not entirely convinced about following B^4's aesthetic advice.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

There was a big budget remake of it titled "Peter Jackson Presents The Lord of the Rings" a few years back, but it's not as good as the original.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Also, too...